“At least,” a friend of mine started, breaking into the muted normality and sourceless white sunlight of the morning after the referendum “at least we might get some good art and music now.”
It’s an age-old correlative drawn between times of political upheaval and creativity; passionate political convictions are what petrol is to fire and bops are to Freshers’ flu. And three years on, I would argue there is a palpable revolutionary spirit in the air; between calls to topple a monarchy with the power to say ‘yes’ to prorogation, to ones wishing to suspend parliamentary democracy altogether so we can just ‘get Brexit out the way’, and, of course, Extinction Rebellion currently camped outside Westminster, the existing social and political orders are being questioned and confronted from all sides.
While we can debate the chicken-and-egg relationship between art and revolutionary spirit (as Sofia Sanabria de Felipe does here), it’s certainly true that the political situation has given rise to a plethora of consciously political cultural responses. From satire series to street art, and pro-European exhibitions to musical apologies (see ‘The Ignorant Englishman’ by Beans on Toast) frustration and outrage has been translated into agenda-rife wit and beauty.
The thing about self-consciously revolutionary art, however, is that it rarely has a particularly long shelf-life. Perhaps this remains most obvious in pieces that are pragmatically revolutionary; demonstration posters, graffiti, propaganda. Things like Guerrilla Girls and posters of Johnson and Trump’s lovechild are destined – designed, even – to become quickly dated. The frantic energy exhibited in the Dada movement in the early 20th century (insert Hugo Ball wearing cardboard tubes for trousers, pseudo-satanic chanting and an idiophonic triangle) evokes at best a sense of entertained bemusement in a modern audience. At the time, the group’s performative cross-media art was an insurgence against a political system that had emotionally, psychologically and financially bankrupted its subjects. It was anti-war, anti-state, anti-institution; anti-everything – including the institution of language and art itself, through which it begrudgingly expressed its dissidence and because of which it eventually fell apart out of hypocrisy.
A fate comparable to many a political revolution too, coming to think of it.
Another example is seen in the ongoing resentment of modern art (of the Duchamp’s urinal type) which gave rise to the trend of lampooning articles on gallery-goers taking photos of forgotten glasses and misplaced skateboards. Nowadays the old ‘painting a chair red and calling it “introspection III”’ inevitably borders on platitude. We get it, you’ve decontextualized art. But the only reason it annoys us so much is because the revolution was successful; we’ve moved the goalposts, revised the boundaries between art and the ordinary. ‘Modern’ art has become historical artefact.
And yet this can’t be the case for all ‘revolutionary’ art. How else would 1984 continue to be the go-to comparison for governmental overreaches, or the Guy Fawkes masks the symbol of protest and anarchy in light of V for Vendetta?
In a few weeks’ time the Oxford Playhouse will be hosting a performance of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, a play written at the end of the 19th century and universally either banned or heavily censored at the time. Addressing themes of sexual assault, abortion, suicide, child abuse and sadomasochism, the piece remains unsettling to the present day. At the time it was all the more deeply disturbing for being a direct attack on the sexually repressed society of the Weimar Republic – and all of the institutions, from education to marriage, that perpetuated that culture. Why then, is a play that is ultimately about advocating sexual education, still relevant to a society that is, arguably at least, sexually liberated?
The unifying theme in Wedekind’s disjointed play, however, rings hauntingly true even in the present day. Generations are pitched against each other as the adults’ institutions not only fail to prepare their teenagers for real life but use them as scapegoats for societal ills when their botched safeguarding causes tragedy and misery all around. The teenage protagonists are left to explore, explain and take action themselves. Watching Greta Thunberg accuse preceding generations of apathy, ignorance and looking the other way makes a scary comparative, especially when the response is a life-size effigy of the sixteen-year-old being hung by a noose from a bridge in Rome just over a week ago.
Equally, with unplanned teen pregnancy an ongoing issue, abortion debates, consent issues, a worrying trend in unrealistic sexual expectations in adolescents as a result of unrealistic portrayals in pornography and a lack of proper LGBTQ+ information in sex-ed – it seems like we still have a way to go on the sexual revolution front.
This, perhaps, is the bottom line: pieces remain inflamingly revolutionary so long as the problems they address are present. Once the social or political order is successfully challenged, the pieces take on the status, more than anything, of historical document – just as William Hogarth’s caricatures now recede into the quaint British tradition, as will, one day, the editing of Johnson’s face onto the body of a pig.
In a sense, then, revolutionary pieces that go out of fashion are a sign of successful change. In which case, one can only hope that Spring Awakening, and the performative demonstrations of XR go out of fashion very, very soon.
Art by Amber Mae Yilmaz
Hogarth: Place and Progress
Prostitution, criminality, madness, lust, and squalor.
William Hogarth’s collection of paintings and prints at the Sir John Soane’s Museum satirize 18th century urban crudities through graphic pictorial dramatizations and dark wit. Brought together from the National Trust, the National Gallery, Tate Britain as well as private and in-house collections, Hogarth’s series use the urban spaces of London’s streets, home interiors, brothels and public hangings to narrate stories of the exaggerated every day. The Rakes Progress, A Harlot’s Progress, Marriage a la mode, and Four Stages of Cruelty amongst others, document descents into immorality as urban fashion spurns on vulgarization, and industrial wealth breeds greed and idleness alongside endemic poverty. Hogarth is a brave critic of London and its moral topographies, and the grandfather of the modern political cartoon; he speaks in generalization but shouts for the injustice of the individual.
The Rake’s Progress begins with a fortune. A young and handsome son to his miserly farther, Tom Rakewell seeks to flaunt his wealth and status through public displays of indulgence. In ‘The Levee’, Tom, in his own home, is surrounded by court-men of the likes of Frideric Handle and Charles Bridgeman – real life characters, who act as objects of curiosity and symbols of sophistication in his lavish harem of entertainers. In mapping the moral geographies of London, Hogarth moves the story to the Covent Garden brothels, where Tom parties wildly with syphilitic prostitutes, who steal from their inebriated clients. With immense artistic skill, Hogarth generates a dialectic of debauchery; the spaces of the brothels are diseased and dissident, social structures are subverted, yet the scene is paralleled by the extravagancies of the aristocratic drawing room and the criminality on the London streets. Hogarth holds a conversation with society which simultaneously holds account the wider forces industrialization and capitalism and their injustices, whilst implicating the individual in the minutiae of everyday actions both because of and regardless of intersections of class, race and gender.
It’s a tragic ending. Tom Rakewell ends up in Fleet debtors Prison which prompts his descent into madness and eventual transferal to Bedlam, his existence in the urban ultimately determining his fate. In A Harlots Progress and Marriage a La Mode, shown alongside Rakewell’s reversal of fortune, the characters are similarly doomed; a country girl-turned prostitute dies of venereal disease, and the wife of a murdered husband and hanged lover commits suicide. Hogarth insists on human subjectivity yet utilizes caricature and hyperbole in order to achieve a notion of reality and verisimilitude. In other words he exaggerates plot lines and individuals in order to discern a truth about wider society. The city is the ultimate culprit of social disarray and is an actant in the fates of those forging a life within its boundaries. However, Hogarth is on the side of the riotous, the rowdy, and the disorderly; he unfolds stories with a humour that pervades the real, extricates London’s familiarity and homeliness from the turmoil, and softens his pointed commentary. He is a performer and an agitator – prints are as shocking as they are perceptive- rather than an activist and executes his prints with an agenda to entertain and to receive artistic recognition; despite his own criticism of institutions, he seems to seek their approval.
The spaces within the Sir John Soane’s Museum spar with the curated disorder within Hogarth’s series. An architect and a collector, Soane generated a world of a thousand histories through the juxtaposition of disparate objects; antiquities dating 250bc are placed amongst 19th Century. It is eclectic, but its arrangement invokes a multiplicity of stories supporting an overarching ‘whole’. This is paralleled in the array of characters and narrations which constitute Hogarth’s wider social observations. The audience’s physical proximity to the pictures – hung at eye level on panels – enables an intimacy with the scenes which engulf the audience in their complexity and playfulness.
Hogarth; Place and Progress offers a striking portrait of 18th Century London life which transects immoralities that permeate all aspects of society. Through parody and exaggeration, he exposes the lived realities as forced by the difficulties of urban existence, and through unrivalled artistic merit generates humour from the squalor and desperation. It is simultaneously heartbreaking and riveting; the audience is pulled through London and its doorways and alleys into a world of dissidence and jarringly human relations.